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User blog:TheRadBoy/How is language learning going?
Hi, everyone! Been pretty inactive lately, eh? We haven't talked about languages in a while. I've been procrastinating a bit on language learning ever since I moved out of Poland. But, recently, I've started to be interesting in it once again. I do have a fair amount of schoolwork, so I'm probably going to have to learn languages only on weekends. Oh, well. Anyways, now I'll discuss everything in more detail: Spanish As you may know, I'm taking Spanish at school. I learned Spanish for two years in Poland, and now I'm going to learn it for two years at Prospect High School. My school offers three levels of Spanish, and this year I'm on Spanish 2. If I get a good grade, I'll move onto Honors Spanish 3 next year, and hopefully I'll be fluent when I'm done. Yay! I've been doing very well in Spanish. My average is 97%, in fact, until recently, it was 99%. I can tell that I'm learning pretty quickly. I hope I'll still be so good at it once we move on to the harder aspects of Spanish grammar. French My membership on FrenchPod101 expired in, like, May. Speaking of which, I'm about to renew it today and continue my French learning adventure. My worst problem is that I'm not as interested in French as I used to be, but I'm not going to stop until I'm fluent. I definitely forgot a lot of French in the past months, but I think that achieving fluency by the end of sophomore year (which is also my goal for Spanish) is a fairly realistic goal. I have almost 2 years. Italian in the future? Other than French (which I'm learning at home anyway), and Spanish (which I'm learning right now), my school offers Italian. I think that I should take advantage of this and learn it after I'm done with Spanish, as a junior and senior. Because my school offers three levels of each language, but I only have two years for this, I have a plan. In the months leading up to junior year, I'll study some Italian, so that I'm ready for Italian 2 when school starts back up, and so that I have the chance to attend Honors Italian 3 as a senior and also become fluent, I hope. Japanese: I give up As you probably remember, I tried to learn Japanese along with some of you back in the summer of 2014. Well, when the school year came around, I gave up. I thought that I might get back into it, but now I know: probably not. It's just so complicated. I remember struggling to learn hiragana and katakana. If I struggled with those, how will I learn kanji? Also, I remember there being, like, 20 different versions of each pronoun. Verbs seemed pretty easy, but there were other hard aspects of grammar, such as word order. Maybe one day I'll start back up again, but not in the next few years, for sure. Asian/Middle Eastern languages Even though I gave up on Japanese, I still really want to learn an Asian/Middle Eastern language. But Chinese, Arabic and other major ones seem so hard! I'll probably have to learn some easier, albeit less useful Asian/Middle Eastern languages. Some of the ones I've been considering are: Hebrew, Persian, Indonesian. I'll explain why. Hebrew is basically an easier (but less useful) version of Arabic. Hebrew's alphabet is a lot easier than that squiggly mess of a script that Arabic has. Also, the grammar is apparently easier, but similar. Either way, if I ever do want to learn Arabic, it will be a lot easier for me since I will have learned Hebrew. Another language that might help me with Arabic is Persian, which uses the same script and shares some vocab. It's probably more useful than Hebrew, though, and a lot easier grammatically. So I might go with Persian. As I said, Indonesian is also an option. Although it has many speakers, it's pretty darn useless for a Westerner. But it is very easy, often listed as the easiest Asian language. Other options includes Filipino, but I think that it's the least useful of them all, and Hindi, but I think that one might be too hard. We'll see. Category:Blog posts